Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, then, not only is discord unavoidable, it is in fact necessary for the achievement of deeper forms of beauty. Although the loss resulting from the conflict between two individuals is tragic, this discord helps avoid tameness or ‘anesthesia’ by introducing uncertainty, unpredictability, and freedom. Discord plays an essential role in…
“Whisper whisper whisper.” –Anonymous ASMRtist old pond– frog jumps in. Plop! –Matsuo Bashô “In Whitehead’s analysis of an occasion of experience, the “category of transmutation” (PR 63) describes how the felt qualities of past events are fused into a new event with the consummatory satisfaction of an emergent pervasive aesthetic quality. […] Whitehead’s “satisfaction” is identified…
“When confronted with someone who literally thinks blacks are subhuman and should be killed off en masse, what is the appropriate response? […] Simply treating someone as an equal participant in the public sphere legitimates them. And given that they are speaking boldly in public, they are not susceptible to public shaming — indeed, they…
“By introducing possibilities of such action that go beyond what the situation would otherwise allow, God expands our freedom. Violence as we ordinarily understand it restricts the freedom of its object.” –John B. Cobb, Jr., process-relational theologian Most of us have a decent understanding of what freedom is, or at least we think we do….
Recently I was attempting to discern the differences between a generic panentheism and a Whiteheadian, process-relational panentheism (as I understand it). I kept coming across little diagrams online and I quickly realized that the panentheism diagram I kept seeing did not come close to the process-relational type I was familiar with. So, I created my…
Pete Holmes: That’s interesting because I think most of my comedian friends, specifically, are often worried that if they go to therapy–or if they work on themselves, or if they meditate, or if they have a spiritual practice or a discipline or something–that they’ll be less funny. A lot of them want to smoke cigarettes…
Preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations. For in the end, that is all we have. If a thing cannot be imagined first — a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS — it cannot be. Life is bound by what we can…
Does God ever call us to injure other people? Again, I think the answer is affirmative. If killing Hitler could have stopped the Holocaust and shortened the war, Bonhoeffer was right to support that project. On a much lesser scale, Jesus used violence to cleanse the temple. Whitehead pointed out that “life is robbery.” For…
Groups in which people are very similar tend to get along well. They don’t disagree, they don’t cause any trouble and they are frequently low in creativity. If you want to make sure that creativity is kept to a minimum then reduce the diversity in groups. In contrast when teams are made up of people…
I’m really excited about this special event coming up at Valley Mosaic next weekend. We will be hosting Tracy and Seth Wispelwey for a weekend of conversation, music and creativity. Tracy and Seth are peace activists working toward their earnest desire for reconciliation and transformation through conversations and active engagement in issues of social justice….